Twenty Years Apart
Before writing about Never Say Never Again last week, I decided to have another look at parts of the 1983 film, guided by the audio commentary track recorded by director Irvin Kershner and film historian Steven Jay Rubin. I had started listening to their discussion over a decade ago, only a short time before the director’s death. Kershner’s passing in 2010 came as no surprise to me, given how frail he sometimes sounds while recounting the ordeal of making the film.
I also played a few scenes of From Russia With Love, which solidified my feeling that this was the early Bond film which Never Say Never Again strove to imitate, or at least wound up resembling.
In my lengthy blog entry I wrote that Lionel Bart’s title song was used only diegetically until the end credits roll, which was not quite accurate. It briefly plays at full volume early in the film, before being manipulated to sound tinny, is if being played on a portable radio. Almost the same thing happens at the end, though without any EQ adjustment. The volume is simply ducked under a final conversation between Bond and Tanya before being potted up full at the end.
There is a hurried, makeshift quality to parts of From Russia With Love, as if the filmmakers weren’t quite sure how to get the film out of the starting gate or how to bring it to a close. Bond’s line to Tanya, “He was right, you know,” while examining some footage supposedly shot of the two of them making love in Istanbul, refers to an earlier comment by Red Grant which was cut by censors. Bond helpfully repeated Grant’s line while looking at the snippet of film, but his reading of that line was also cut. Audiences have been left scratching their heads over who was right about what, ever since.
Last-minute script changes required some of Lotte Lenya’s scenes to be reshot after sets had been struck, leading to her being photographed in front of a rear-projection of the original scene. Footage of Klebb gazing at Blofeld’s aquarium is first played backwards and then forwards, a few moments later, to cover some of Blofeld’s new voice-over. Bond's and Tanya’s last scene together was also filmed using an obvious rear-projection screen, as though part of a last-minute effort to give the film some sense of finality.
A new team assembled from scratch was scrambling just as feverishly twenty years later to find a way to end the latest Bond film. Never Say Never Again might have actually beaten Octopussy into theaters, if not for the need to shoot additional footage during the summer of 1983. It was another case of a finale that had been given short shrift during principal photography.
Like many other globe-hopping films, both From Russia With Love and Never Say Never Again were victims of chaotic shooting schedules, with screenplays that were being adjusted on the fly. As a result, both required some surgery during post-production. The difference is that the earlier film kept being tweaked until it finally clicked, proudly wearing its battle scars as it unspooled in front of packed houses . NSNA would have benefitted from a few more reshoots, or at least another pass through the edit suite. Unfortunately, there was no money for either.
The 1983 film has clever writing and excellent performances, but editing that is crisp only in spots, incredibly slack in others. Overall, it can leave viewers feeling as if they’ve watched a work-print of a promising film that’s very nearly finished, but not quite ready for release.
From Russia With Love was the victim of its own marketing ambitions. In a bid for universal box-office appeal, the novel’s Cold-War Soviet villainy had been traded in for the shadowy machinations of SPECTRE, a totally imaginary consortium of evil that could offend no one.
In Fleming’s book, a top-secret Soviet decoding device, the “Spektor," is dangled as bait in a SMERSH operation to kill James Bond and humiliate MI6. The device which Bond hopes to smuggle out of Istanbul along with a beautiful defector, is actually a bomb which will kill the team of British cipher experts who attempt to dismantle it.
In the film version, obtaining a working model of the device now known as a “Lector," is SPECTRE’s ultimate goal. Killing Bond and creating embarrassing headlines for Her Majesty’s Government will just be icing on the cake, payback for the loss of their operative in Jamaica, Dr. No.
Rosa Klebb, former head of SMERSH, has defected to SPECTRE, but pretends to be working for the Soviets in order to win the trust of a loyal Russian cipher clerk named Tatiana Romanova, who offers herself and the Lector to 007 as a package deal.
Adding a confusing level of double-dealing to the plot evidently required reshoots to clarify exactly who is going to be doing what to whom, and why, as if a little more explaining would make any difference to moviegoers.
These are two films that belong together, a fascinating double-feature from a team of filmmakers on the verge of finding their footing, and then twenty years later, a new team searching for a way to start over fresh. Yet surprisingly, the films are united by their commitment to give movie audiences the genuine flavor of an Ian Fleming original.